I don't know about this. It seems pretty friendly as it is. Anyone can easily filter out fics based on the characters in it, the genre, the rating, the word count (with the longer fics usually being pretty decent in quality, considering an author would have to spend quite a chunk of time on it), and even the language. It's not that difficult to customize a search in order to find a fic that would suit your tastes. Like Asty said, review count isn't everything, especially on FFNet. Unfortunately, if review count can't be relied upon, that means that the art of finding good fic there is the same as finding it anywhere else: you have to trust rec lists from other people. That's something that's subjective, not something that can be quantified. In other words, it's not possible to build a search engine based on something like that.

Your best bet, then, is to just use the filters to zero in on the genre, rating, and/or characters that you prefer. Alternatively, the communities serve as rec lists, so you can look through that too.

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Professional ninja. May or may not actually be back. Here for the snark and banter at most.